


Ten Second Tidy

by somethingmoresubtle



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Bickering, Domestic, F/M, M/M, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, Post-Season/Series 02, rated m for extreme potty mouth, sypha and alucard double dog dare trevor into emotional intimacy, the title is HYPERBOLIC THIS CASTLE IS GONNA TAKE A ZILLION YEARS TO CLEAN, trevor belmont: good at monster slaying bad at metaphors
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2019-11-04 04:25:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17891429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingmoresubtle/pseuds/somethingmoresubtle
Summary: After everything, there is the cleanup.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> the working title for this was dirty beats for tidy bitches, in case you were wondering. I know you were wondering. the actual title is from big comfy couch. it was a toss up between that and barney and CLEARLY, big comfy couch is superior.

Trevor and Sypha are less than a league away when he drops the reins in horror. “Oh shit.”

She tenses, head lifting from his shoulder. “Oh shit what.”

“I forgot the whip.”

She slaps him across the shoulder where she knows a wound is still healing, and he flinches. Good. “How did you forget the whip?”

“I don't know! I was thinking about other things!”

“Other things? Like what? Forgetting your fucking head?”

Trevor looks away, flushing. “Look, this is really your fault when we get down to it. I told you I'd never packed a wagon before.”

She stares, unimpressed. “Are you really going to try to put this on me Trevor Belmont? Do you really want to go down in the story as the man who couldn't remember his whip because he was too busy trying to figure out how to put sacks of flour in a wagon?”

His shoulders hunch further. “It was harder than it looks.”

She deflates, anger leaving her as quickly as breath. “Well. Nothing for it. We need go back.”

Trevor sighs, turning back to face her. “I don’t need the whip, I just really-”

She holds up a hand, forestalling whatever else will come out of his beautiful dumb mouth. “I know you don’t need the whip. I'm just worried about what else you've forgotten to pack.”

After that, he complains, but emptily, especially when she leans her head back on his shoulder. After pinching the tendon between his index and middle finger. Hard. Speakers by nature and neccessity travel constantly. It’s bad luck to turn back on the first day of the journey, which is less superstition and more practicality. When Speakers leave a place, they're rarely welcomed back with open arms.

The sound he makes when pinched is weirdly satisfying. She maybe understands a bit more why Alucard delights so in pestering him.

So they go back. And very clearly, they can't go back on their way after the Thing, which Trevor swear to fucking Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners etc. etc., he did not see, but Sypha is not an idiot and also has eyes, and he definitely saw It.

The road can wait. It doesn't even hurt to say, doesn’t fill her with the restless anxiety that comes from being in a place too long. Not after she saw the Thing. To be honest, she can’t stop seeing the Thing, when she closes her eyes, or when the light hits Alucard’s face in just the right way. She can’t believe she was stupid enough to leave him alone.

 

* * *

 

After everything, there is the cleanup. Not like, an emotional cleanup, god forbid, but the literal cleaning of a castle that was a) flooded b) on fire c) other wacky magic shit Trevor can’t remember, d) had a lot of vampires (but mostly Alucard) thrown through the walls, e) apparently the reanimation of corpses into creatures of the Night Horde which he didn’t want to think too closely about and f) plain good old fashioned monster slaying.

The smell alone could kill a man that hadn’t destroyed his sense of smell through repeated abuse over, say, a decade and a half, but Alucard grimly muttered about ko-ler-ah or whatever, and even Trevor was a bit nauseated about anything festering in a place he needed to sleep. Plus, Sypha kept stepping in gooey shit whenever she got too distracted by a book or some architecture or ‘mechanical innovations of the like she’d never seen before, it's amazing’ and slipping and falling on her face. Which: very funny at first, progressively less funny every time it happened. Trevor is here because of, well, reasons, and seeing Alucard look like he’s going to have a hernia when she scrapes her forehead against a wall while admiring a staircase (again) is directly contrary to the goal. The castle needs cleaning.

All this being said, a Belmont has his limits. Which is why when Alucard glides into Study 14 (distinguishable from the million other studies by its eastern facing windows and books relating exclusively to flora of Northeastern Europe, as well as a stubborn viscera stain on the hardwood that Trevor just cannot leave alone, it looks like a kelpie, it haunts him, okay) with a fucking tone, Trevor ignores him. It’s much harder to ignore him when he looms right over his shoulder, obstructing the light that allows him to see the fucking stain, damn it.

“Belmont.” Alucard says with a voice like sharpened steel. “Explain how the fuck you got vampire on the vaults twenty feet off the goddamn ground.”

Shrugging, he scrubs at the stain anyway. “With a whip, probably.”

Alucard picks him up by the collar like he’s, he’s a loaf of bread or something instead of two-hundred pounds of Belmont muscle. “Put me down you lunatic!”

“Why,” Alucard hisses, “would I do that, when you are responsible for fucking up my castle.”

“And I think I have been pretty clear that Sypha broke your murder castle first. The gears look like bloody salt taffy! Pick her up by the scruff and make her fix that before we spend our time on the stupid ceiling arches!” Trevor hollers, feet dangling miserable inches from the ground.

At that, Sypha yells through the archway leading to Study 14b, which is full of pressed flowers or something. It’s reportedly medically astounding. Her hair’s probably all tousled from how she runs her fingers through it when reading something particularly interesting. It’s a bit muffled, because, archway, you know, but it sounds a lot like the weak argument Trevor’s heard a hundred times before about how no, she hasn’t broken shit.

“Sypha,” Alucard says, “did what was necessary in an impossible situation. You did the irritating and completely unnecessary. Which is on brand, I suppose.”

Sypha sticks her head through the door, and yeah, her hair is a mess. “Thank you, Alucard. At least someone appreciates me.”

He nods, graceful in a way that shouldn’t be possible for a man still holding Trevor by his damned shirt collar. “Of course.”

She nods back, like they’ve settled something. There’s a little curl sticking almost straight up near the middle of her forehead. It’s distracting enough that Trevor doesn’t notice that Alucard’s started walking them away until she’s out of sight. He wriggles. Nothing happens except the popping of some seams around the shoulder. “This shirt,” he says, slowly, “must have been tailored by the gods. It has incredible tensile strength.”

At that, Alucard drops him. Dick.

It doesn’t matter that it was just a few inches.

* * *

 

Alucard doesn’t even need to touch him. The threat of his cold fucking hands touching Trevor anywhere is enough. He steers him bodily from three feet behind him, and Trevor feels much too much like a misbehaving sheep being lead back to pasture. By an overzealous sheepdog. That could eat him. It’s not a perfect metaphor, he knows that, but Alucard staring javelins at the nape of his neck makes it hard to think much of anything unrelated to survival.

It’s really, really awkward. Usually Sypha is the bridge between them, the balance to their family’s story. If she was here, they wouldn’t be listening to the echo of their boots on cobblestone. Granted, they’d probably be arguing, and Trevor is trying, he really is, but arguing is as good as he’s gotten thus far.

“So,” his stupid traitorous mouth drawls, “come here often?”

Alucard literally trips at that, so slight that if Trevor wasn’t an observant fucking genius, he wouldn’t’ve noticed how his step faltered. “It’s a hallway, Belmont. What do you think?” The javelins are now ice javelins trying to stab through Trevor’s neck. It’s awesome.

(He never really grew out of his pigtail pulling phase, but that’s nobody’s business but his own.)

“I just can’t help but notice.” Silence. “That you seem super not mad about how Sypha melted your magic castle-movey gears.” More silence. “I mean. She’s the reason you’re stuck over ye old Belmont House. Seems. Suspicious.”

Alucard sighs, exasperated. “I assume you’re going to tell me why it’s suspicious at great length.”

“You assume correctly.”

“And there’s little chance you’ll save me from the tedium of your ‘deductions,’” he says, making the quotation marks audible like an asshole.

Trevor scratches at his chin, stubble overlong rasping against his fingertips. Alucard makes a tiny sound behind him, but when he turns to see whateverthefuck that was, his face is as placid as ever. However, Trevor Belmont is no fool. The interrogation is working. “Anyway. Suspicious. Gears. Where was I.”

“You were telling me that I must have some dastardly intent by not yelling at Sypha for, in your words, melting an integral part of my father’s castle in a life-or-death scenario. I imagine you find it, as you say, ‘suspicious’ that I could act without malice.”

Trevor balks, stopping short. Alucard almost runs into him. Almost. “Do you honestly think- Nevermind. It doesn’t matter.” And he marches doubletime down this endless forsaken hallway towards wherever the fuck they’re going, because it doesn’t matter, why does he even bother trying.

Alucard lets the mausoleum silence envelope them again. Trevor lets him. It’s clearly what he wants.

They stop at a particular arch approximately nine hundred feet off the ground in the main hall, Alucard a chilly presence behind him. High enough that he has to crane his head all the way back to see the alleged vampire goop.

“Actually,” he says, after great deliberation, “fuck this.”

Alucard reaches out and grabs him by the collar again like a one trick Tracy. “I would not recommend running.”

Trevor tries to take a deep breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth like Sypha taught him, to let the fury bubbling up through his throat pass. Tries. Really. He wraps both hands around the delicate knob of Alucard’s wrist instead, pivots on the ball of his foot and is throwing him over his hip before he has time to think it. To both their surprise, Alucard hits the floor with a thud.

The look Alucard gives him is ball shriveling. Trevor opens his big dumb mouth anyway, and repeats himself, deliberately enunciating because apparently he hasn’t got his message across.

“Were you young when you sustained brain damage?” Alucard says, lifting himself up from the floor, hair dragging through the dust in a way that makes Trevor wince, “or was that a more recent development?”

He shrugs, crossing his arms and hyperware of the weight of his whip against his thigh. “You’d be surprised at how often I hear that.”

“I don’t think I would be.”

“Are we going to fight or not, asshole?”

Alucard’s eyes flash red, and Trevor sees how he digs lengthening claws into his palms. And closes his eyes. Breathes in through his nose, and out through his mouth, because apparently one human disaster plus Dracula castle isn’t enough for Sypha to fix, the bloody multitasker. And of fucking course, Alucard does it better. When he opens his eyes, they are their typical gold and his face settles into an expression that doesn’t promise imminent, terrible, death.

“No,” he says, “ I don’t think we will.” And then he moves, so fast that he flickers out of sight and Trevor can’t help it, his hand is on his whip while his brain screams enemydangerfear in countermeasure to his gut which screams otherwise, and then there is a grip around his waist and his feet are off the ground and he’s look at vampire giblets two million feet off the ground.

He does not yelp. Or windmill his arms about. Definitely doesn’t pee a little.

Alucard floats forward a bit, so that Trevor is within arms reach of the arch. “Well? Get to it.”

Trevor swallows audibly, which must set off his creepy vampire instincts because the fingers wrapped beneath his ribcage tighten. Note to self: buy Sypha a turtleneck. Ten turtlenecks. “I would like to repeat my earlier argument. You may recall. I said fuck this, with conviction, several times.”

“I fail to see how that has any bearing on the situation at hand.”

“I’m just saying,” he quavers, a little desperately, “that I don’t see how my presence is required when you can fucking float.”

Alucard makes an amused sound at the back of his throat, which he should never’ve been close enough to hear. “Count yourself lucky that I didn’t make you climb.”

“I don’t know,” he says, strangled now, “if being held twenty feet off the ground by a floating vampire is much of an improvement.”

“Don’t be such a baby, Belmont, it’s barely fifteen.”

“Put me the fuck down!”

He hums. “Well, if you insist.” His grip loosens and Trevor plummets towards the ground. He doesn’t have time to scream.

 

* * *

 

Sypha is enjoying a rare peaceful moment that’s edging towards an unheard-of peaceful hour when she hears Trevor hollering- quiet, at first, but growing ever louder. She sighs, and lays her bookmark down before chaos descends. Which it does, heralded noisily by Trevor’s voice and a heavy boot kicking the door open.

It’s an interesting sight. Every inch of Trevor not covered by clothing is vermillion, and one hand is tugging Alucard along by his wrist like an itinerant toddler. Alucard’s mouth keeps twitching dangerously close to a smile. She has to purse her own lips together at the sight, and even that is not enough. She has to mask the grin that wants to split her face in two with her hand.

“Tell her.” Trevor demands. “Tell her what you did.” When he turns to glare at Alucard, she flashes him a discrete thumbs up.

“Yes, Alucard, tell me what you did.”

He sighs. She thinks it’s probably an attempt to compose himself before laughing outright. “I dropped Trevor.”

She presses her palm more firmly against her mouth. “How far did you drop him.”

“Fifty fucking feet,” hisses Trevor.

"Please, Belmont." He shifts his weight, moving fractionally closer. “It was more like fifteen."

After that, her peace and quiet is well and truly broken, and she ends up accidentally taking out a chunk of mortar with a poorly aimed spell and Trevor completely destroys a door frame in the ensuing argument, but it seems well worth it for the sight of Trevor's hand on his wrist, the smiles they both had to hide.


	2. Chapter 2

The logistics of the situation, to Alucard’s complete lack of surprise, were not considered until the metaphorical dust had settled. The less said about the literal dust, the better.

The three of them had been aimlessly poking through debris pretending that every single moment they spent together wasn’t incredibly awkward when he heard a growl, so shocking in its suddenness that he hissed, turning to see his attacker, too fast and too human.

Trevor laughing himself sick at the sight of him, quote, ‘whipping himself in the face with his own goddamn hair’ did not endear him. Sypha flushing and slapping her hands over her stomach like it would quell its complaints did.

“It’s nothing, it does that all the time,” she says over the sound of Trevor cackling in the background.

He frowns. “You do recall we traveled together previously. I don’t remember this happening often, if at all.”

“Too busy squabbling with- shut _up_ Trevor!” Sypha aims a kick at him, and Alucard isn’t sure that she misses through luck or intent. “Squabbling with the idiot down there.”

“Sypha. The rubble can wait.”

Trevor, from where he’s finally lifting himself from the floor, knuckles tears from his eyes, and Alucard has to pointedly look away from how they shine. “I could eat. Plus, God knows we don’t need any monster rumors circulating. The rumbles from Dracula’s castle they’ll say. An omen, they’ll say.”

Sypha opens her mouth, clearly raring up for a quarrel, when she’s interrupted again by her stomach. “Fine! Yes!” She snaps. “Maybe if I eat something your company will be more tolerable.”

Trevor winks at her, hooking an arm over her shoulder, neatly cutting Alucard from the scene. “C’mon Sypha. You know I’m never tolerable.”

She elbows him in the stomach, hard enough for him to wheeze. “All too well.” She sniffs, and just as Alucard can see them walking away, leaving him to the dark and rot of this bedamned castle, she holds out her elbow like a gentleman would to a lady, hundreds of years from now and countries away. “Mr. Tepes? Would you so kindly show me to the dining room?”

He places his hand on her, delicately, baffled. “Of course, Speaker Belnades.”

Trevor jostles Alucard through Sypha, and she elbows him again, gentle. “Lead the way.”

* * *

 

They stare at the pantry. After a long moment, Trevor drawls “I’m not sure what I was expecting from a castle chock full with vampires. A larder stocked to the brim just to taunt their victims? A root cellar filled with potatoes? Why do you even _have_ a kitchen?”

“My mother,” Alucard says, stiffer than he means to, “was human.”

The way Trevor shuts his mouth has an air of guilt. Alucard doesn’t really care.

She sighs. “I would love a potato. Roasted. With butter. So slow that the skin’s cracked and the butter melts into the soft part inside.” She makes a dreamy sound, eyes clouding over. Alucard clears his throat pointedly, and she snaps to attention. “Okay. Right. Foot-in-your-mouth Belmont. Go hunt.”

Trevor squawks. “Foot in your mouth _what_?”

She glares pointedly. Among the many things that Alucard admires about her is how she communicates. There is no question that she speaks clearly and strongly, a voice that carries through a crowd and settles in their ears like the kind of wind that follows a gale. He has never met a Speaker that cannot speak. But with her body, she says things eloquently in moments with the angle of her shoulders, the way she raises her brow and crosses her arms to say _do you remember what we saw hours ago? Do you remember the love that when violated led Dracula to destroy the world that birthed her? Do you remember how thirty seconds ago you hurt Alucard again, unthinking and brash like you so often do?_ There is a little twinge of something like jealousy that Trevor seems fluent in these little motions. That it is something all three of them share, when Trevor and Sypha seem to have so much just for themselves.

“We could all go.” Alucard says, like sharing more time with them both, to insert himself more thoroughly into their lives, would be a trial.

Trevor scoffs. “Don’t know if we’d all be hunting the same thing.” The moment the words come out of his mouth he cringes. He doesn’t apologize.

Sypha elbows Trevor for him, and it warms his heart more than it should.

 

* * *

 

Alucard is terrible to behold. Probably not for the reasons one would think.  
  
“Sypha.” Trevor hisses. “Do something about his hair.”  
  
She doesn’t look up from where she’s reading a passage about wheat yields in the area and soil substrates, wiping the desk mindlessly with a dirty cloth. “What's wrong with his hair?”  
  
From the corner of her eye, she can see him goggling, slack-jawed. “Are you blind? Watch.”  
  
She watches. Alucard bends to pick up several books, and Trevor makes an agonized noise that gets stuck somewhere in his throat. After that, she watches more closely, and the noise repeats when he leans over a table, shuffling the books there until they're in an order he deems acceptable and places them on a stack of other books he’s picked up off the ground.  
  
Sypha closes the book. “I am not picking up what you are laying down.”  
  
“His hair, you idiot.” He seethes. “It is dragging through the fucking filth like a serpent through dust you-” She watches him practice the breathing exercise she’s been teaching him. It’s had limited success. “Make him braid it. Better yet, you braid it. He wouldn't say no to you.”  
  
She gestures to the haircut she’s trimmed monthly since she was ten, old enough to travel in the caravan. “Do I look like I know how to do hair?”  
  
“You're a girl, aren’t you?”  
  
Glaring, she splashes him with water from her bucket which at this point in the day, is more blood and dust than water. He reacts noisily. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that he’s the last son of a legendary hunter bloodline. You'd think the reactiveness’d be trained out of him at some point. Maybe Alucard has an answer, if it's on purpose or something he pretends to, something else to make Trevor seem toothless and harmless and small. “I never learned how. There’s not much point when most of us keep our hair short. Less upkeep.”

He squints at her. “How on earth- never mind, it’s not hard, it's like two steps-”

“If it's not that hard, why don't you do it yourself?”

Trevor stops, appalled. “Are you suggesting that _I_ braid his hair?”

“I'm not suggesting anything. You're-” He makes the noise again as Alucard rights a vase and pale-gold tendrils of his hair spill into a pile of what used to be intestines- “ _You're_ the one that's driven to distraction.”

“It is a literal fucking monstrosity, Sypha.”

She opens the book again.“So fix it. I thought you were mister monster hunter.”

“That.” He makes a face. “That is a stretched metaphor”

She hums, already more focused on soil than Trevor. “That is very rich from a man that compared the gears to taffy.”

" _Stretchy_ like taffy.”

“I wish,” Alucard says from across the room, “that the prophecy had foretold that two of the three would be stupid fucking idiots that hadn't quite grasped whispering. I wouldn't have bothered getting out of that coffin in the first place.”

Sypha gathers the magic that always twists and coils at the core of her, and pushes a tiny bit through her palm, sending a series of ice balls the size of apple seeds straight between Alucard’s eyes. His eyebrows arch, offended like a cat. “How dare you.” She says, sending another round.  “It’s three idiots, and you know it.”

He huffs, a small thing, and then flips Trevor off.

Trevor reacts, noisily. “Hold on, why are you flipping me off?”

Alucard shrugs, and Sypha watches the jut of his shoulder blade rise and fall like light through stained glass. “Feels right.”

She flicks another ice ball at Alucard. “Behave. Trevor is trying to save you from yourself. Your… shelf? Because of the dust on the bookshelves?”

Trevor whistles, long and descending. "Sypha, darling, it's a very good thing that you're pretty and maybe the best magician of this age, because Lord Almighty.”

Alucard looks a little bit like he did when Trevor ‘accidentally’ gave him a love tap with his whip. “My god.”

“That was. So unbelievably terrible. Like, I honestly can't believe it.”

She flicks ice at Trevor next. She doesn't aim kindly.

They do get terribly distracted after that, because, in a development that is a shock to exactly no one, their bickering begets more bickering, and really, it's hard to show self restraint and to keep their fighting just verbal when the castle is in pieces so thoroughly that it’s hard to imagine putting it back together. Sypha accidentally pushes Trevor into a pile of books Alucard had been carefully cultivating, and when she dodges Trevor’s answering tackle, she accidentally slips on a pile of goo that oozes away angrily, flashing willowisp green as it shifts grumbling back into the dark, and to Trevor's deep and vocal dismay, Alucard’s hair gets further choked in dust when a good snap from the Morning Star sends him over a spiral staircase that goes down to the dungeons.  
  
The less said about the ensuing bitchfest the better.

Later, when Trevor is done wheezing against a table in hysterics, choking on “your face, oh my God your face” while Alucard did his best to appear patient, they tidy up the room. They had signed a contract, after the third evening, that they needed to end every day with a net gain of cleanliness and organization. Otherwise, they'd be here until the fruition of time.

“Well then?” Alucard says, back turned to them.  
  
There is a long beat of silence while Trevor and Sypha look at each other, figuring out who he’s talking to. Sypha’s life would be much easier if Alucard and Trevor weren’t allergic to using names, as if by saying them aloud it implied some kind of ownership. “Well then what?” Trevor says, slowly, like he’s preparing for a counter attack.  
  
“Braid it, if it upsets you so.”  
  
Trevor makes a truly incredible face, and she has to wonder at its elasticity what with the scarring. “No.”  
  
“I see.” Alucard drops another stack of books, and it rings through the room like a decisive parry. “So you're scared then.”  
  
She doesn’t bother stifling her laughter. “Oh shit, Belmont, called out in your ancestral home.”  
  
“By a vampire.” Alucard adds. He hasn't moved, but his posture shifts predatory.  
  
Trevor’s mouth works for a moment, struggling to bring argument to life. “There’s no way I can get out of this without you two giving me shit for eternity, can I.”  
  
“Definitely not.”

“Definitely, definitely not.”

* * *

 

Sypha, looking way too gleeful as she pulled out a chair for Alucard to sit on, has the sheer fucking _audacity_ to grab a chair of her own, resting her chin in her hands like she’s about to watch a minstrel play a lute terribly and then get murdered by a vampire.

He, uh. Lost track of that idea. Which is _perfectly_ reasonable, considering that Alucard is sitting below him, back turned like there’s nothing Trevor could do to hurt him, hair spilling everywhere and not relaxed, exactly, but not tense either. Like this is an everyday occurrence.

Gingerly, Trevor has to push away the flood of hurt that accompanies the memory of how it used to be, for him, a ritual old enough that he remembers how his hands used to be too small to grasp Sonia’s hair, how it felt like the silk of the girls’ formal dresses between his fingers. How when he fumbled learning the complex patterns that Sybil favoured and yanked sharp at the roots, she’d yell and tattle and still let him try again the next morning, and the next, until there was nothing to complain about. Until there weren’t any next mornings to share.

“Are you sure,” Sypha says from the audience, “that you actually know how to do it? You seem to just be staring at the back of Alucard’s head.”

“Perhaps it’s an avant-garde technique.” Alucard muses, whatever the hell that means. “Or perhaps he’s gotten cold feet.”

He blusters, because it’s a classic deflection technique. “I was just waiting for you to scoot close enough to reach. And a comb. Don’t have a comb.”

Across the room, Sypha digs into one of the many hidden pockets inside her robe, and tosses an oddly beautiful ceramic comb at Alucard. Who holds it up for Trevor like a dare. Fucking asshole. He snatches it from his hand. Takes a moment to just look at it, wonders if there’s a story attached, for brilliant pragmatic Sypha to keep an object for which she has no use so close to her breast. Heart. Don’t think about Sypha’s breasts. Don’t think about not thinking about Sypha’s breasts.

Alucard sighs, long suffering, freeing him from a road that goes nowhere good. “Some time today would be preferable, unless you’d like to be cleaning until midnight.”

Courage, Belmont. Careful not to brush against skin, Trevor pulls the rest of Alucard’s hair over his shoulder, and begins teasing out the knots at the ends, one hand placed halfway to the roots so he doesn’t pull at his scalp. “A lot of talk for someone who needs to make sure books are alphabetized before he puts them down.”

He snorts, like a real person might. “A lot of talk for a man that barely knows how to read.”

Trevor hums in response, too busy trying to detangle a cruel knot to come up with something funny. He thinks he can see a branch sticking out of it. “I need a- Sypha, come here, hold this.”

“Do you really need another set of hands to comb hair, Belmont?”

“I do if I don’t want to hurt you.” He says absently. From the corner of his eye he can see her, hovering. “Put your hand here. Firm, but don’t pull.” Once she’s replaced his grip further up, his vision narrows to the hair, and the comb, and the world outside tangled up in it, slowly being smoothed. Eventually, there is a hand in his way, and he knocks it aside, not unkindly, as he works his way up to the crown. He gathers it up- so much of it, more than he’s ever worked with before- into three parts. His fingers are clumsy from disuse, and there are calluses that rasp unfamiliarly, but his body remembers. He doesn’t notice he’s done until he goes to fasten the frankly unreasonably thick braid and he has no tie.

“Here.” Sypha says, quiet. It’s a piece of ratty old ribbon, but it’ll do until Trevor can find something better. He knots it, careful not to tug, and blinks back to sanity. Alucard is so still beneath his hands. Sypha is so close, with her clever eyes, and he feels known.

“I’ll just go, uh, elsewhere.” he says, totally natural and not like a guy that just massively fucked up, and flees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, crying: I wanted this to be a funny story
> 
> trevor belmont, spitting blood: fuck you
> 
> (The Belmont sisters' names were picked up by random from the wiki. )


	3. Chapter 3

 

The sound of Trevor Belmont, of _the_ Belmonts, renowned monster slayers and protectors of men, fleeing from the room is not a sound easily forgotten.

Vampires, in general, lay with other vampires. A vampire child is an eerie thing in its hunger, stick limbed and ravenous, eyes old long before its body would catch up.

Alucard does not know one like himself. Once, a very long time ago, he had asked his mother from where she’d been hunched over a microscope for so long that her neck cracked when she straightened out, if there were others like him. She smiled, the crow’s feet by her eyes crinkling deeper in a way that fascinated him, made him press the pads of his fingers there, wondering. His father, for all his age, had skin of unsettling marble. While he touched the proof of her mortality she held him close, kissed the part of his hair. Murmured _there is no one like you, sweetheart, my dear Adrian_ , like it was a gift.

The books that spoke of dhampir were brief and useless, speaking more to the abomination that was their birth then the life they may have after it. So Alucard, overall, was unaware of his ability to blush. The heat that had spread across his face and spilled down his chest as Trevor sifted his fingers through his hair, careful, proved otherwise.

Sypha had been standing stock still and quiet. If he hadn’t been so... distracted... he would’ve seen it for the warning sign it was.

Too late.

“I think,” she says, a cup overflowing with delight, “that you and I need to talk.”

 

* * *

 

It is fucking wild that he and Sypha forget how strong Alucard is. Really, all things considered, Trevor should be in a constant state of tense paranoia. Or more so. Tense paranoia is his bread and butter, and he’s cool with that. He’s seen Alucard throw fucking _Dracula_ through brick and mortar like he was swatting a particularly irksome mosquito. He should be constantly prepared for Huge Muscles Tepes to fuck up his entire shit.

He’s now also seen Alucard lift up a bookshelf twenty feet high when Sypha, consternated, cried out as her pencil rolled underneath the scrolling woodwork at its base.

Alucard didn’t even _breathe hard_.

Sypha had just smiled, patted him on the shoulder carelessly as her mind turned back to whatever caused her to scribble notes so furiously over the last few days. Which: concerning. Fangy Fanglosvik? Deeply concerning.

The fear factor is undercut slightly by the days old braid still hanging over his shoulder. It’s frizzy and huge chunks of hair have fallen loose and it’s making Trevor’s fingers itch so much that he needs to go fix that thing. On the ramparts. Now.

The next few days have Trevor jumping at shadows. Sometimes literal shadows. It’d be embarrassing if he wasn’t already fully, deeply, embarrassed, right down to the bone. Ugh, no, _bone_. He's doomed. Literally doomed.

It does not escape his keen eye that Sypha and Alucard are acting, well, not normal, they’re too fucking weird for that, but typical. Alucard taunts him. Sypha ignores any invitations to fight if her attention is absorbed by something more interesting. Alucard continues to have no idea how to properly maintain hair, and it’s making Trevor’s eye twitch something awful. The castle remains unparallelled in regards to filth, and seemingly endless in its twisting corridors and stairs.

Why it’s so hard to find a decent corner to hide in in an infinite bloody castle, he just doesn’t know.

Actually, scratch that, he does. It’s because Sypha with a mystery is like a feral mutt with a bone.

(Stop thinking the word bone Belmont, stop thinking it right now.)

 

* * *

 

It is easy, sometimes, to forget that Trevor is the last child of a noble family. There is something about the slackness around the eyes that make it difficult to recall that Trevor can even read, never mind read rustily in four different languages. Or manage a sprawling estate and township. Dance court dances popular twenty years ago.

Or, apparently, remember formal table settings.

Trevor pauses from where he’s been rehanging cabinet doors for the last hour to wipe at his brow. Alucard hadn’t meant to watch him. He’d had his own task in the balconies above. But there was something to the way his hands fit around a screwdriver, the care he took to fit the hinges and latch on some of the hundreds of cabinets in this castle’s endless rooms. How he hummed snatches of half remembered songs under his breath.

It was a blessing, really, that Trevor didn't know he was there. He bristles in his presence. He finds himself hungry for more of the Trevor that isn’t just Belmont, isn’t just his family and his history. It is… distracting, when he is soft.

There is a repetitive thudding sound, growing louder as it grows closer, and Sypha skids into the room, wild eyed and breathless. “Trevor. I need to find a book.”

“I assume you mean a particular book.” Trevor says, standing up with a groan. Alucard winces as his knees crackle like thunder. Human bodies and their frailty.

She nods. “Yes. On feasts, or etiquette, dining rooms, maybe. I think I found a _puzzle_.”

He crosses his arms, leaning back. The tilt of his throat makes Alucard’s mouth do a reasonable impression of a desert. “A puzzle that requires dining etiquette.”

“ _Yes_ , there seems to be a door that only appears and opens with the correct arrangement of objects.”

“That,” he says, straightening out again, “sounds dumb as hell. I love it. Fuck the book. Show me where to go.”

Sypha, from where she’s nearly bouncing up and down in excitement, pauses. “Really? You know what to do?”

He claps her on the shoulder and Alucard’s not sure who to be jealous of. “I’m a Belmont, baby. We know everything.”

She snorts. “I’d like to see you try.”

“Lead the way.”

Alucard follows, obviously. He flits through the shadows above and behind them.  They haven’t yet had a conversation about whether or not he could transform like other vampires that were old and wily enough. He’s loathe to admit it. He feels disarmed already. Having another trick yet in his quiver soothes the anxiety of fangs sheathed, fists uncurled. They don’t notice him. It’s difficult to tell if it’s true ignorance or pretense, especially with Trevor who lies with an unerring pulse of aorta and smooth corded muscle. Sypha, whose own heart is slow, abiding until it beats hummingbird quick in excitement, in rage, is much less able to lie.

There is a pang in his own chest, for which there is no time to wallow in. Below, the good natured bickering that questioned not only Trevor’s brains but his manhood lulls as they reach a door which Alucard doesn’t particularly recall from his youth.

With a tinge of something like regret, he’s beginning to think that the home he thought he knew really is endless, a serpent with many coils devouring its own tail holding his world together.

“Come on.” Sypha says, dragging Trevor through the door, so enraptured she misses his complete lack of resistance. “It’s in here.”

 

* * *

 

“Hm.” Trevor says, forefinger pressed against his mouth, chin resting on his thumb, a mock of thinking. “This is truly insidious. Only a madman could create a puzzle such as this.”

“Don’t be so bloody, Trevor. Here, listen to the riddle.” Sypha clears her throat as she unrolls a scroll old enough to crumble. Unconsciously, her shoulders press back as she breathes into her stomach, preparing to speak. If Alucard was less distracted by the truths of her body when Sypha _is_ , he would remember the riddle. He doesn’t.

Belmont, in counterpoint, has been moving plates off the sideboard for a full minute now. Sypha gingerly rolls the scroll back into its canister. “You’ve got it?”

“Sure.” Trevor says absently, big scarred hands folding cloth napkins into roses.  The first two are loose, awkward and lopsided, but the third napkin’s folds are crisp and precise. He shakes the previous two out and refolds them. “Pretty obvious. Fourth stanza refers to a particular table setting at the marriage between Lucrezia Sforzando and Croetius Dhtorak II. End to a brutal decade of battling and subterfuge ‘tween their families, signed a peace treaty the next day as soon as they saw the bloody sheet. But then there’s that snotty bit where it’s all judgy about the additional dinner courses near the end. How opulent and disgusting people became, as if needing proof of a stolen maidenhead wasn’t barbaric. Seven courses,” he says, a wry twist in his voice that makes it vibrate low and resonant in Alucard’s ears, the last elegant rose placed carefully on fine bone china, edges gilt in filigree, “is lavish and coarse. Five courses is so much more appropriate. Must consider how your serfs starve and labour before you put on a show.”

“That meant so little to me.” Sypha is clearly trying to affect disinterest, but her eyes gleam like a fox discovering an ill-guarded henhouse.

“‘s why we don’t need these forks and spoons. They want you to think it needs to be an exact reproduction so you fuck up and the acid sprays out of the vases or something.” He frowns at a toasting flute, and picks it up to wipe the dust off with a grimy sleeve. The frown deepens when he exacerbates the smudge. “Do you have a handkerchief?”

“Imagine my shock that you don’t.” She murmurs as she pulls out a freshly starched square from one of her many inner pockets. Miffed, Alucard reminds himself to ask where on earth she’s found a steaming iron later. Belmont makes a grabby motion without looking, and murmurs “thanks dear” when she passes it to him, completely absorbed in _table settings_. Sypha flushes. Alucard would sketch it if he had opposable thumbs on hand. Alucard would sketch Trevor’s frown at his excellent wordplay too if he had a tongue capable of speech.

As Trevor meticulously arranges the now-immaculate glass in place, there's a Dracula-appropriate dramatic rumbling from the far side of the room. A fireplace rotates on its axis revealing a small door.

There is a moment of stillness before Belmont and Sypha wordlessly high five, grinnng at the door.

 

* * *

 

 

Sometimes she cannot believe that she forgets her own bullheadedness. It is harder to imagine yet after the last year, where she not only was turned to stone by a cyclops while searching for a messiah on a well-flimsy folktale, but pulled Dracula’s castle to herself with not much more than words and will.

Perhaps bullheadedness is not quite the right word. Her grandfather would remark on her astounding ability to not only run into trouble headfirst, but run smiling and willing.

She is very glad Grandfather isn’t here for this.

“Of course.” Trevor seethes, voice jumping an octave and a half into the brother of a yelp as vines wind his feet together. “Of course _you_ would find a room unlocked by setting a table that lead to a sentient fucking plant.”

She slaps at a curious tendril the best she can with the way it’s wrapped her hands together. She really doesn’t want it to find the pocket with dirt from the land she was born in. Trevor’s whining would not be helped by the monster(?) growing three times its size. “You walked in at the exact same time as me, Trevor. You are just as guilty of not noticing it before it was too late.”

He truly yelps as the plant suddenly swings him upside down, face purpling as blood rushes to his head. The plant shakes him for good measure. “Why am I the only one upside down then?”

“I imagine it’s the lack of respect you’ve shown her.” Comes cooly from the door. Alucard is leaning dickishly against the doorframe, inspecting his nails. When she’s freed she’s going to box his ears, even if she needs to find a ladder to do it. This is _not_ the kind of behaviour they discussed.

* * *

 

Trevor face falls, figuratively, as the plant tugs him higher. “Great. Just great. The one thing that could make this experience more humiliating.”

“Don’t be such a pessimist, Belmont.” He chuckles, and despite Sypha’s annoyance it sparks something warm and heavy in her belly. “There’s plenty of ways this could be much, much more embarrassing.

She slaps again at the tendril going for her dirt pocket. “As fun as this is, did you come to laugh at us or actually help?”

“It can’t be both?”

“No.” She says sternly.

“My mistake. Let me start over.” And he walks out, leaving only the sound of greenery slithering over cobblestones. Just as Trevor opens his mouth to start another diatribe, Alucard reappears in the doorway.

“My.” He says, mouth twitching. “You two seem to have gotten tangled up in something.”

She rolls her eyes as Trevor groans, long suffering. “Hello, Alucard, yes, would you mind helping us out?”

“Certainly.” He kneels down by some brightly coloured blooms. “Have you had your fun?”

One flower, belled like a daffodil but curiously blue, nods slowly. The vines gripping her unwind, and she hears Trevor hit the floor dully behind her.

“There,” she says, “was that so hard?”

Alucard tilts his head, predatory and not. “I guess not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey all, thx for your kind words. feel free to shower me in validation. look forward to a PLOT (?????) and more idiots as there is now a Real Direction planned for this masterwork (???????????????????).
> 
> Shout out to the guy that invented the screwdriver in the 1400s. Opposite of a shout out to me for thinking this show was set in the 1400s until I started writing this note. 1100s? 1200s? whatever. FICTION.
> 
> PS if you have good ideas for pet names and sweet nothings Trevor Belmont would say when he's not paying attention, hmu, I have no idea, I'm suffering


	4. Chapter 4

None of them really know what it means to stand still, to stay in one place and grow. They’re much more familiar with dirt roads, endless anonymous inns and faces they’ll never see again, if they’re lucky, and if you’re not so lucky, like Trevor undoubtedly is, faces you’ll see one more time in the dark of an alley before blood’s spilt and you’re up and running again. Which is to say, Trevor has highly developed senses. A keen fucking eye. So naturally, he’s noticed the developing trend of Sypha being the absolute worst.

First he thought it was ingrained habit from the road, to feel tense and worried simply because he’d stayed in one place too long. Then he thought it was the good ol’ Belmont paranoia going a bit haywire, because Alucard and Sypha weren’t _actively_ dangerous, at least not at the moment, not to him, which is a _lot_ , and not really something he wants to think about. The most danger he faced on a daily basis was dirt and stubborn stains. (Which he has questions about. He complained once, _once_ about the sheer impossibility of built-up filth. Alucard had said something about the castle, blah blah place time blah, not necessarily in the time of the world around it blah, Sypha called all work to a furious halt so she could write notes and ask question upon question, and Trevor'd had to walk away before his brain melted out through his ears. Needless to say he still has questions and will very happily and not at all nervously leave them unanswered.)  Still. He can’t help but wonder. Did Dracula take a decade to mope around the endless hallways and ever ascending and descending stairs, evilly cackling every couple of yards? Did Alucard grow up in an absolutely filthy house with no upkeep? Was he an adorably curly haired child that was loved by a human mother and father approaching human before the church burnt his heart out? Whatever. Not the point.

The point is that Trevor was an _idiot_ to doubt Belmont paranoia. If he’d paid attention, he wouldn’t be here. Eating breakfast. With a literal inadvertent demon.

Sypha stumbles into the room yawning, hair tousled and sleep rumpled in a way that makes Trevor very aware of all the things he could be doing on the other side of the castle in safety, regardless of the way his stomach’s gnawing at his spine. Before he can tactically retreat, Sypha drags her chair over to his side of the table, and collapses like a poorly constructed tent beside him. The hairs on his neck raise as her elbow brushes against his as she folds her arms into a makeshift pillow, dropping her head with a thunk, and stays there, fever warm through cloth.

“Gnh.” he postulates. Sypha grunts something in return.

From the hob where Alucard is reheating last night’s stew and bringing water to boil, he snorts, making it a trifecta of terrible sounds. Wow. They saved the _world._  “No one could accuse the two of you with the sin of witty conversation.”

“ _You’re_ a witty conversation,” Trevor retorts, and accepts Sypha’s off target high five before she slaps his face with great satisfaction. Said satisfaction curdles immediately into panic when she curls that hand around his elbow. Which is already being touched by her elbow. Which is attached to the _rest_ of her body that leans against the rest of _his_ body.

Admittedly, falling backwards off his chair wasn’t the plan, but it lets him excuse away the redness of his ears as embarrassment.

Sypha being all… _touchy_ isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is how Alucard will look at them with something close to hunger. The worst part is how his eyes will flicker to Sypha and how that hunger will be neatly tucked away as he takes a step back into his dusty lonely castle, as if there’s only his father’s legacy to inherit.

And Sypha has the gall to call him stupid, as she guts Alucard blithely with every careless friendly gesture.

 

* * *

 

 

“So.” Sypha says, smiling into her tea. “Trevor fixed your hair again.”

Alucard opens and closes his mouth uselessly. “I literally do not have words to describe the experience.”

“Was it… sensual?” She asks, blinking guilelessly as he sprays tea across the table.

Coughing, he replies with as much dignity as he can muster after spitting darjeeling all over antique cherrywood. "I do not know what I did to deserve that."

“Ooo, avoiding the question. So it was _very_ sensual. Describe it. Did he say-” Sypha clears her throat before lowering her tone in a gruff imitation of a voice nothing like Trevor’s-  “‘oh Alucard, what lovely hair you have. Let me caress it.’”

“Hardly. He more or less tackled me in the hall after breakfast and bullied me into a chair.”

“With desperate eyes.”

“Desperately neurotic. Have you heard him conspire about that stain in the study?”

She shrugs. “You have to admit, it does look a lot like a kelpie.”

Affronted, he places his teacup decisively in its saucer. “It looks nothing like a kelpie.”

She shushes him. “Go back to your story. I imagine he went ‘Sweet Alucard, I want to do your hair like a stern fifty-year old mother who has a lot of laundry to do before fishmongering to support her children,’ because that is what it looks like. Which is not to say it looks bad. I just need to update the plan if Trevor has a thing for angry maternal women. I can work with that.”

“Can you?”

This smile she doesn’t bother hiding. “It suits you. The braid around the crown is really something. Brings out your cheekbones”

“Don’t be jealous, Sypha. If you rub your hair in some dirt Trevor might make yours pretty too.”

She sniffs. “If you have time to get shirty with me you have time to pour more tea.”

As he goes to do so, the china on the table starts to shake worryingly. He pauses mid-pour. “What on earth-”

A blur carrying the distinct and terrible odour of Trevor Belmont crashes through the wall, blasting chunks of stone and mortar in a wide arc. Instinct has him dodge, but he hears Sypha yelp as she’s hit, the bright copper tang of her blood clouding his thoughts.

“What the _fuck_!” Sypha yells as Trevor attempts to throttle the thing strangling him. What a stupid fucking ‘Belmont Plan.’ Asphyxiate them before they asphyxiate you! Idiot.

“Hey guys,” he wheezes cheerfully. “I found something in the basement.”

“God, what does it take to shut you _up_ ” it screeches, an odd clicking to its voice, like a viper before it bites. “I’m not a ‘ _thing,'_  you, you, you _clumsy footed homewrecker_!”

“Hey now. Trevor’s not clumsy.” Sypha protests mildly, adding further credence to his developing theory that idiocy is contagious.

“Wait, what?” Trevor says, his face blooming worryingly purple as his voice grows weedy.

“You heard me you nasty-”

“Enough.” Alucard says, letting glamour flood his voice. They still. Sypha, unaffected, picks up her teacup. It cracks, and crashes to the floor, leaving her with a china handle and a frown. She’s been struck across the forehead. Blood flows freely down her cheek. “Release him.”

The naga hisses, but lets her tail uncoil from around Trevor’s throat. It’s a good twelve feet long, and takes up most of what remains of this sitting room.

“Trevor.” Sypha reproves. “Let her go too.”

He does, warily, still gasping for breath. “It absolutely started it.”

“I don’t care who started it.” Alucard says. This is a lie. He wants to carve that naga’s scales from her flesh one by one and make her swallow them before he moves on to her fingers.

The naga scoffs and crosses her arms. Trevor notices her breasts, apparently for the first time, and Alucard has the unusual experience of seeing a human’s eyes nearly fall out without outside assistance. “Holy shit, you’re naked.” His face, which was slowly fading back to a more natural colour, flushes brick red. “Can you. Cover those.”

“Can you cover your ugly face?”

“Children,” Sypha says, sipping delicately at his blatantly stolen tea, like it’s a god bedamned garden party, “One at a time. What’s your name, monster who was until very recently trying to kill our friend?”

She glares. “Chanda. And I wouldn’t have done it if this asshole hadn’t come in and started messing up my nest.”

“Nest?” Trevor interrupts, still looking nowhere near her. “That was a _nest_? A bunch of rotting leaves and sticks?”

The naga lunges at him again and Alucard is forced to glamour her still. Hopefully Trevor is too busy squawking at her nudity to notice. It's not a conversation he wants to have. “Belmont. Shut up. Naga. Explain to me why you’re living in my castle.”

She shifts uncomfortably. “I need a place. And your castle is huge. Like, weirdly huge. I didn’t think you’d notice me way down in the dungeons.”

He smiles, and it is not kind. He feels his fangs lengthening, his vision narrowing to the thrumming pulse in her throat. “So you trespassed knowingly in my home. Threatened and injured _my_ companions when you knew you were in the wrong.”

Sighing, Sypha wraps her hand around his wrist, preventing him from ripping out the naga’s throat. It wouldn’t do to get her blood all over Sypha. She just did laundry yesterday. “Okay. We get it, Mister Lord of the Castle. She messed up. I bet she knows that now, right, Chanda?”

The naga’s heart rate has steadily ticked upwards as they’ve spoke, but whatever she sees of his face now has her pulse thrumming. His teeth bristle and lengthen, an overcrowded forest of bone, and as he sneers he feels his bottom lip catch, be pierced, bleed. Speaking like this is more trouble than it’s worth with all the tearing. It’s tough to intimidate with bits of his own face flopping around. He settles on seething. The way she backs up in response, away from Trevor and Sypha, is _good_.

Sypha’s grip tightens. “Alucard.” Her fingers are so tiny. Her hand can’t wrap all the way around his wrist.

Trevor steps towards him, face purposefully and infuriatingly pedantic. “Careful, big guy. Might get the wrong impression, start thinking you care about my personal safety and what have you. Also, you’re bleeding all over the floor. I literally just cleaned this floor yesterday. It sparkled.”

Alucard closes his eyes and slowly counts to ten, twice, both to calm himself enough to transform back, and to tamp down the desire to curl one hand around Trevor’s face, pick him up and- “Yes. We wouldn’t want that, would we.”

Sypha coughs, badly disguising a laugh. “Were you going for sincerity? Because that sounded very sarcastic.”

“Wait. Hold on.” Trevor says, gaping like the world’s most attractive guppy. “Are you implying that you actually _do_ care about my safety?”

The naga clear her throat. “Do I need to be here for this?”

“ _No_.”

“Because um. I think. I’m gonna go. Since you seem to have forgotten. I’m here.” Alucard hears the smooth slide of scale against stone, and doesn’t bother looking away from whatever weird series of flops Trevor’s face will go through next.

Sypha hums. “I don’t know, Alucard, seems like you were upset when someone roughed up Trevor. It would follow that you care about him.” A cough. “His safety, I mean. Care about his safety.”

Trevor’s too busy gloating to notice her slip. “She’s right. It sounds like you do. What would your parents say?”

Sypha groans. “ _Trevor_.”

 Alucard pinches at the bridge of his nose as if it will stave off a Belmont-induced headache. “I should have let her strangle you.”

“Nope, nope, no take backs.” His grin is almost as nauseating as his smell. Alucard informs him as such. His grin broadens. “You want me _alive_. You think I’m the _best_. You think I’m the best even when I _stink_.”

Sypha shifts next to him, taking her hand from his wrist to cross her arms. “I’m standing right here, Trevor, of course he doesn’t think you’re the best.”

“Sypha _is_ the best.” He agrees.

Trevor stabs a finger at Sypha viciously. “ _No take backs_!”

“And where,” Alucard says, as the naga finally reaches the door, “do you think you’re going?”

“...Away?” She sounds unsure, and young, and stupid. He seems to have a weakness for stupid these days.

He sighs, and blows away a pesky strand of hair that’s fallen into his face already. Trevor’s hands twitch. “Come over here. We’re going to sign a contact, you and I. I have no issue with tenants if they mind me and my own and clean up after themselves.”

Chanda does a noticeable doubletake. “I- you- they’re- oh! You’re really…?”

He rolls his eyes as the headache settles in. “Regrettably.”

Sypha glares up at him, flicking him hard on the arm. He is wise enough to not mention that the pain barely registers. “Don't be rude. Set a good example for young Belmont over there.” Trevor squawks.

“ _Clearly_  the best.”

 

* * *

 

Later, when a contract has been drafted and discussed and redrafted and reviewed and signed by himself and his tennant, after he’d rummaged through his father’s desk for his seal, and sat down hard on the floor for a good long while, empty, after he eventually got up unsure of how much time had passed, after he’d seen Trevor and Sypha lurking unsubtly down the hall before scuttling away at the creak of the door, after returning to the room where Chanda, his tennant and his responsibility fidgeted as she waited, after he melted wax and pressed his father’s seal to paper, easier than he imagined, after he shook Chanda’s hand and waited for her to slither back to her allocated portion of the dungeons, after he slowly lay down on the floor and let himself be blank-

After that, they are sitting in the library with the fireplace Trevor pretends not to favour. He cannot remember who carved the clever animals leaping and japing across the mantle, but he wants to remember how Trevor smoothes his palm over the carvings if he thinks no one is looking, how Sypha’s face glows in the firelight and how he wants to press his fingers against the smile lines that bracket her mouth. She’s curled on a settee near the hearth, legs folded underneath her and eyes sleepily reading the same few lines of her book over and over again. Trevor, who if pressed would say it’s incidental before running from the room with a stupid excuse, sits on the carpet near her, whittling something. He isn’t far enough yet for Alucard to guess the shape of it. Maybe he’s just whittling a piece of wood to a smaller piece of wood. It seems like something he might do, just to grin shittily as it gives Alucard a headache. He lets himself relax in his own chair, letting every muscle held tense and angry smooth themselves quiet.

Across the room, Sypha’s head begins to nod up and down. He lets his own eyes begin to close.

“Trev’r.” She murmurs, vowels slurring. “T’mrw. You need t' take a bath.”

For a moment, maybe Alucard’s last peaceful moment ever on this Earth if Sypha has her way, all he can hear is the warm crackle of the fire.

The next moment is filled with Trevor’s indignant screeching. He tamps down a sigh, and sneaks out of the room before Sypha can use him as ammunition in the next step of her ineffable bloody plan.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: wow, having three characters who literally wont stop talking is super hard to write 
> 
> also me: adds another character to the scene
> 
> also, thank you if you tried to placate my time worries. I was trying to have like, one anachronistic reference per chapter but limit them to Alucard knowing what they are but whatever. fiction. theres a naga in transylvania town now. I got really caught up in thinking this was set in the 1100s when it's in the 1400s. research is for nerds and potatoes are a universal constant .


	5. Chapter 5

The thing is that Sypha isn’t sleeping.

At first it wasn’t an issue. At first, when she left the caravan there was at least the small noises of Trevor and Alucard nearby, accompanied by the bone deep exhaustion of their journey, mind and body immediately relenting to the calm tireless black behind her eyes. And that first night back at the castle, after they saw Alucard on the floor among broken glass, wracked with these great heaving sobs, completely silent, she’d been busy thinking.

It took a couple of days for her to really notice the silence.

It sounds like a parable that her grandfather might tell her. How do you notice absence? How curious it is that your mind comes to expect certain rackets, like Georgio’s feet rasping together from where he’s kicked off his bedroll, how Aunt Agatha’s off rhythm snores would rattle any loose cutlery. Other things too, like the susurrus of cloth and against cloth, how she’d feel like a warm ember in a cooling hearth when she’d wake, the edges of her body indistinct as she cuddled into her pillow further, as hushed voices spoke and stoked the fire up again, boiling coffee that clouded the air electric.

Which is to say that she’s lonely.

It’s stupid to feel lonely. Trevor and Alucard are… forces of personality that are mostly very dumb and loud and inhabit most of her waking hours. She should be thankful to open the door to her very nice room with its brocade bed curtains and luxurious rug, the window that opens up to miles upon miles of swaying pine. She has her own chamberpot. A lamp. A very nearly polished mirror. She finally has the luxury of being alone, a sensation she’s craved again, and again, and again, nauseous with the constant presence of people.

But when she guts the last candle and crawls into bed, it is _silent._  Even if she hears wind moving through trees below, the low crackle of fire in the hearth, the rustle of her own legs in her bedclothes, her ears ring painfully empty.

Luckily, Sypha is not a dithering moron (like Trevor) or willing to suffer in silence (like Alucard), so she tugs a quilt off the bed and tucks a pillow under her arm, and pulls the door open, letting in a ghastly chill from the hall. She shivers, and almost second guesses herself. Almost. Puffing a mote of flame into the air, Sypha walks down the two sets of stairs and four hallways to her destination, increasingly incensed as her feet get colder with every step.

As her hands are very full, she kicks the door. Gently. It’s possible he could be asleep. In which case, she'll kick harder.

The door opens silently, which she privately thinks of as a lesser vampire magic. Alucard is wearing, to her complete and utter lack of surprise, a ridiculous nightshirt. And an expression one might categorize as genteel panic. “Sypha, what-”

“Move.” She barrels her way in. No quarter. She is sleeping tonight or she will cut someone. “Your stupid hallways are freezing and I’d hate for you to catch cold, what with your very open-chested nightgown.”

“-hold on-”

“Do you prefer the left or right side? I haven’t had the luxury before but I think I prefer whatever side’s further from the door.”

“- _Sypha_ -”

She turns back to him, still standing by the doorway, letting all the cold air and stupid propriety in. “Look. We’ll argue. I’ll say I’ll sleep on the floor. You’ll say something about being a gentleman and that you’ll do it. I’ll say that’s stupid and that your bed is ginormous and leaves plenty of room for Jesus. Win win.”

Alucard presses his thumb into the arch of one eye socket, as if stifling a headache. She ignores it in favour of eyeing the line of his collarbone and the slope of his sternum washed golden in the fireight. Which she definitely shouldn’t touch until much, much later. Shame. “It just doesn’t seem. Proper.”

She scoffs. “Is it because I am not wearing a frilly white nightgown? Is there a vampire dress code I need to meet before I have the privilege of sharing your bed?”

His face fairly erupts red, which is _adorable._  “I’m going to shut up now before I give you any more conversational gambits. Head to toe. Final offer, or I sick Belmont on you.”

Sypha’s already flopping onto the bed. “Deal. I’ll even be nice and not make a comment about the foot thing.”

“You are truly giving.” He says drily, taking the blanket still clutched in her hand before shaking it out, lying it on top of her.

“Magnanimous, that’s me.” She squirms deeper into the covers. This is the best plan. She is the best at planning. “Now, are you joining me or not?”

“Let me close the door first. I’d hate to catch cold in my ridiculous vampire nightshirt.”

“It’s like you can read my mind.”

There is a guilty silence. Her eyes snap open. “The fuck, Alucard, can you read my mind?”

She watches him look down, as if his bare toes on cold fucking cobblestones isn’t a terror. “...no.”

“Wow, _deeply_ reassuring, Alucard. Try again.”

“No. I probably never will. It’s rare even in real vampires.”

Sypha glares. “Then why are you being so weird about it?”

He shrugs uneasily. “It’s technically possible. And I haven’t necessarily been… forthcoming with what I can and can’t do.”

She relaxes back into her pillow. “Oh. Whatever. That’s a dumb thing to feel guilty about. It’s not like Trevor or I have given you an itemized list of our skills.”

“Hm. Yet.”

“Now hurry up and come to bed, I’m shivering just looking at you.”

Slowly, as if Sypha will suddenly change her mind and bolt screaming from the room, he lays down on his side of the bed. Which is truly gigantic. And she did not promise to leave room for a God that hates her.

“Sypha.”

She wiggles her toes cheerily near his face. “Alucard.”

A long suffering sigh. “I hate to give you literally anything more to work with, but is there a particular reason you wanted to sleep in my bed?”

“Sure.”

“Feel like sharing?”

“Probably.”

“I will kick you out.”

She squeaks as he lazily jabs her in the side. “Touchy! Well. I need to sleep. And the room you gave me is very nice and the bed is lovely but. I can’t. It’s quiet. Not nice quiet, though. So it was you, or Trevor, or you and Trevor, but any of those Trevor options would have shocked his nubile virgin sensibilities.”

“I don’t think,” Alucard says, “that you want to use the word nubile.”

“I exactly want to use the word nubile.”

He breathes carefully, deeply, like he’s counting to ten. “Can you stop saying the word nubile in my bed?”

“You are very easily riled.” She yawns. “Which is not a surprise.”

“Good night, Sypha.” If he says anything more, it is lost to the quelling roar of sleep.

* * *

 

Trevor wakes at dawn. Well. Caveat. Trevor wakes at dawn when he hasn’t been pickling himself in cheap ale after staying awake three days straight. Dracula’s castle, while it is full of many things, is short on liquor. Bastard.

So, the upside of the terrible headaches and his shaking hands is following his training regimen more faithfully han he has in years, because, you know. Waking. Dawn. Trevor. That whole business. It feels good to get out of the castle. It’s getting better as they fix it up, but it’s still real Dracula levels of fucking spooky in there. Not enough sunlight. Too much like a tomb in a lot of respects. Which makes it funny in the ha ha I think I’ll vomit now way, that it’s now on top of the last remnants of the Belmont home. Forever, if Sypha can’t de-liquify the magic gears or what have you. He can almost _feel_ the conniption his ancestors are in. Small blessings that all Belmonts are cremated, mostly on purpose, to prevent any nasty revenant bullshit or rolling about in their non-existent graves. Eugh. Bad thought. Bad, bad thought.

It turns what’s usually a slow jog to a punishing sprint through the pines, until there isn’t enough room for air in his lungs, let alone thought in his head. Naturally, he also trips over a tree root near the end of his run and tears a fairly big hole in his shirt. His last shirt. This turn of events isn’t surprising. The Trevor Belmont story is full of swift kicks to the balls when he’s already down.

Case in point- the clearing that he generally trains in is not empty this morning. It’s full of damn vampire.

Trevor’s turning on the ball of his foot and speed-walking the hell out of there before he quite realizes it. Alucard’s sigh is fucking audible from all the way over there in Trevor’s fucking meadow, and he can’t quite decide if it’d be more petty to keep walking or to turn back around.

“Who knew. The last Belmont, as craven a coward as they come.” Floats through the trees and the distance Trevor had hastily put between them. Bastard. Bastard bastard bastard.

“Shut up.” He growls, turning back around. “You could just ask, you know. It doesn’t always have to be a bloody argument.”

Alucard is spotless, and all that gleaming glorious hair is loose and probably Trevor’s going to accidentally get a mouthful of it in a minute, especially after he tackles Alucard for being such a insufferable dickbag who shrugs, fucking shrugs! in response. Trevor is not going to get into how he looks. Or smells. He knows. Another morning’s sweat and grime won’t make a difference. “I’m not the one who’s always spoiling for one, Belmont.”

“Do you even hear yourself?” He wonders idly, knocking his fist against a nearby stump. A panel swings open, and he picks up two staves from his weapon stash within. “No. That was a mistake. Don’t talk more. Shut up. Please. Let’s just fight.”

Alucard arches an eyebrow, infuriatingly superior, and okay yes, sometimes Trevor _is_ spoiling for a fight, and he sweeps the stave and Alucard’s feet out from under him. He wants to grind his smug face into the fucking dirt.

A laugh burbles out of his throat, unexpected and harsh. “Jesus. You came out here for this?” He tosses the other stave to the ground in front of Alucard, who won’t stop _looking_. “Get on your feet. If you want a fight, I’ll give you a fight.”

Alucard doesn’t even do him the kindness of looking savage. Trevor sees his placid bloodless face and his prone body and then he flickers out of sight, so fast that Trevor hasn’t even really processed he’s gone. It’s only instinct screaming _danger_  that has him swinging the stave behind him, a messy block that only takes the brunt of the hit, the tip clattering painfully across his shoulder. After that, Trevor is too busy to catalogue individual moves. There is only the clack of wood on wood, the meaty thud heard when one of them doesn’t block quick enough, the singing of his blood deafening him.

Like this, fighting just because Alucard won’t have it any other way, with unfamiliar weapons, they’re matched well enough. He doesn’t want to think about a reality where one of them really wants to spill blood, shies away from how that story might end. Instead, he focuses on jabbing his stave upwards towards Alucard’s ribs, and when he moves to block his strike, swings it sideways across his fingers. Alucard drops his own stave with a hiss, and good enough, fight over, nothing else to see here.

“Christ.” He flops to the ground feelingly, and inhales the fresh scent of broken clover. “Are you ever not in a mood? Just curious. Asking for a friend.” His head hurts so bad he’s going blind with it, but there’s a peace to it, of a sort.

Alucard takes a minute to respond, like he’s really thinking about it, legitimately pondering if he’ll ever not be a pain in his ass. “I’m trying very hard to not say I’m surprised you have friends.”

He snorts despite himself. “Well I guess that’s growth. It’s sad, you know, if _I’m_ commenting on your lack of character.”

He’s quiet for a long time after that, plucking clover and twiddling it between his forefinger and thumb. “Do you really think that?”

“Nope. No. We’re not talking about our feelings.”

“Oh? Would you prefer to talk about your alcoholism then? Or about Sypha?”

“So that’s a no to not being in a mood then,” he mutters, heaving himself up off the ground. So much for one peaceful fucking moment with Adrian fucking Tepes.

“Are you really going to deny her?” He calls. Trevor stops, like Alucard glamoured him again. He didn’t, there’s no familiar cloying ozone to his paralysis, but it sure feels like it. His eyes close, and he is flooded, not for the first time, with the desperate wish that he’d died in that fire too.

“I’m going to say this once, Tepes. Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me. Don’t even breathe near me.” He turns, and isn’t even surprised anymore at how sorrow so quickly transforms to anger. Alucard’s eyes are wide like this means something, and it makes Trevor want to scream, to bash his hand against a wall until it breaks, to have a fucking drink. “I’m not here for you. I’ll be gone as soon as I’m fucking able, but until then, I want to get to pretend that I’m lucky enough to be in a world where you don’t exist. Do me that small fucking favour.”

Trevor gets his wish. He walks away from the meadow he’s never ever going back to, and Alucard doesn’t say a fucking thing.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hmm!!!!!!!
> 
> this chapter brought to you by my continuing unbelievable relief that I can keep referencing tea and coffee. what did people in Europe even DO before??????
> 
> thank you for your super swell comments. you're pretty cool, yknow? also, you hair looks real nice today. like, real nice.


	6. Chapter 6

Sypha blinks awake, lethargically, eyes crusted with sand. Her body is heavy, but not unpleasantly so, and she is very, very warm. It’s brighter than she’s used to, the warm glow of the sun near its peak washing over the room.

Consciousness comes back to her in spurts, her mind filing the different sensations and facts of her existence into place. At the edges of her, there is exhaustion, the weariness of a life without rest. Beneath that, the simmering fury that’s always at the heart of her. Less esoterically, she has been wrapped very tightly in blankets like the delicate crepes she’d had once when her caravan traveled further west wrapped around cream and fruit. In Alucard’s room. The Alucard’s room part is excellent, duh. This… prudish handling of it, less so. Looks like she can’t look forward to sleeping facing the same way any time soon, bless Alucard’s weird-spinster-auntish heart.

It becomes less charming when she has to thrash her limbs about to loosen her wrappings enough to get a single hand free. Alucard isn’t even there to slap for his misdeeds, and she allows herself a second of mourning that his side of the bed is cold enough for him never being there at all, before she makes way for annoyance. Prat.

Groaning, she wriggles back and forth until she rolls herself off the bed. Efficiency. Unfortunately, the indignities keep piling up, and it’s fucking _cold_ outside of her blanket prison. With her feet going numb and teeth chattering, she runs back to her room to get dressed. Whatever feature of the castle that leaves it freezing despite the lengthening summer days outside can eat her entire ass. Sypha _should_ be able to go to breakfast in her nightshirt and give Trevor an aneurysm at liberty. She should not need to go put on her outside overcoat. Dracula: a monster even in death.

By the time she’s gotten to the kitchen she’s warm enough to do things beside shiver fitfully. Sypha’s rifling through the cupboards for wherever Alucard put the hand grinder (lord knows why a man so compulsively organized can’t put the coffee paraphernalia in the same place twice) when the rule of threes comes into play, sending her day truly to shit.

Chanda slams through the door, and it’s only her panicked eyes that keep Sypha from immediately berating her for taking the door clear off the hinges when they _literally_ just fixed it yesterday. They are a household that are real rough on doors, and at this rate, they’re going to clear cut the forest outside. “Um.” She squeaks, trying to regain her breath, her rather lovely breasts heaving, and Sypha bemoans another Trevor torture opportunity lost. “There’s a. Uh. Problem? I guess?”

Sypha places a comforting hand on her shoulder, which despite its human appearance, is as cool and dry as a snake’s scales. “Slow down. Nobody’s going to die. Nothing’s on fire. It can wait.”

There is a guilty silence. “Um. First off. I need you to understand this isn’t my fault. And also, like, to stand up for me when Young Master Tepes tries to disembowel me like he said he would if anything like this happened.”

“Wow, that is a _terrible_ start. How on earth did you convince Alucard to take you on as a tenant? Are you better at arguing in traditional dance?” And then she finally processes that shitting guilty silence. “Holy shit. Where's the fucking fire."

Chanda grips the hand Sypha’s placed on her shoulder and her talons dig uncomfortably into the bone. “No. Seriously. It isn’t. The thing he wanted to do was way worse. I promise promise _promise_ that I thought I was doing damage control.”

“ _Thought?_ ”

“Fuck. Okay. Let me try agai-”

“By all the-” Sypa shakes her firmly, rattling the babble right out of her. “Run. Slither? Go! Tell me on the way!”

* * *

 

The stone grows colder and damper the deeper they go. Sypha almost misses Chanda’s babbling, and would definitely trade listening to it over the eerie silence broken only by dripping moisture, the careful watch of where she places her feet.

“So the smaller one-”

“Don’t let him hear that.”

“-he comes banging into my suite without a by-your-leave, or even a hostess gift as specified in the contract, Young Master Tepes was very clear on that part, and he is just unbelievably pissed. I thought he was going to fight me again, as like, a test. But I wasn’t going to break my oath, no ma’am. The young master outlined very clearly what would happen. Very clearly.”

She wants to know what the whole 'young master' thing is all about so very badly. Stupid Trevor and his stupid dumb decisions keeping her from something that’s desperately funny. She’s going to kill him when she makes sure he’s not dead. “I really hope this is going somewhere and you aren’t just stringing me along to get Trevor out of your dungeon. Is he sulking? A good row will usually get him out of a sulk.”

Chanda turns, abjectly miserable. “I wish he was just sulking. But he tried to like grapple me, and he kept sliding off because I’m in molt, y’know, and it was really sad and he just kept getting madder, so I said what the fuck do you want? And _then_ he said he wanted some venom.”

“What.”

“I know! So forward! And he’s so simian! No offense. You all are. So I say no way, and he, hold on. Tap that brick with the triangle and the squiggly symbols on it.” Mystified, Sypha does, and a passageway opens up. Chanda slides past her into darkness. “Follow close. Don’t go off the carpet, or you’ll take like, so much burn damage. Anyway. He’s all ‘I’ve got a cheesecloth, a jar, a skull that’s splitting open and no fucking booze, so it’s a home brew baby.’ Which is a direct quote. It was…” Her eyes go distant, like a soldier recalling the battlefield. “Memorable.”

Sypha is so unbelievably distracted by Trevor’s reported unfuckingbelievable stupidity that she trips on the admittedly very nice carpet. Before she finds out what Chanda means by burn damage, the rattling tip of Chanda’s tail wraps around her waist and sets her upright. “I told you to be careful!”

“Yes, you did. You also told me a mind boggling story. Also, it is very dark in here.” She pauses. “Sorry. I have magic. Wow.” She zaps out a firebolt that streaks down the hallway and hangs in a thin line, orange and effervescent. “That was dumb. I am dumb. Tell me about Trevor threatening to milk you more.”

Chanda makes a gagging noise. “Please don’t call it that. Please.”

Sypha grimaces. “I have no idea why my mouth did that, I’m so s-” and is cut off by a terrible drowning screech that fills her chest, floods the hall from the stone beneath them.

“Oh no.” Chanda moans. “He got through the lock.”

“What lock?” She near yells.

“Just. You’ll see. Hurry!"

 

* * *

 

Trevor lashes his whip at another wight whose jaw is hanging on by only a bit of gristle. Which seems a bit much. They’re… what was it... incorporeal! That’s the word. Should be able to mumbo jumbo it back on. Or all the way off. That’s basically how that works. Probably. The wight howls as the tip of Morning Star catches corporeally across its incorporeal cheek, before fading out of sight again. Trevor takes this as a well deserved opportunity to swig back some of the _very_ nice vodka Dracula had on the bottom shelf. Trevor feels _awesome._  Blessed weapons are _awesome_.

He feels slightly less awesome when a different spook catches him with the bottle tipped back and rakes its ethereal claws across his shoulder. “Fucking _ow,_  really. Was that really, _really_ necessary.” He snaps the whip at it, but it poufs before the consecrated bits can touch it, and, well. Historically, leather has not been particularly effective against ghost types.

And boy howdy, did the Belmonts ever try. Gotta admire the chutzpah of a hunter saying _What if I just put more leather straps on my clothes and that makes them monster-proof?_ Gotta admire further that they fucking lived despite it, for a while, at least. And isn’t that all anyone gets? A while? Hasn’t Trevor had longer than his fair share?

He gulps back another mouthful and actually dodges correctly this time around. Fucking tactical genius Trevor Belmont gets the green one with a missing eye who wails dramatically before turning to dust.

Trevor ‘Fucking Genius’ Belmont also shatters another jar on the shelf. Alcohol does not flow out. Which is a blessing. And a curse, actually, as another spirit wails in his ding-dang _ear._  His ancestors, for all their peccadillos, did not store spirits in glass. Another win over Dracula for the Belmont line.

(They used clay. And silver. And solid gold, if you were Leon bloody Belmont and needed to show the world how huge your dick was. But not glass.)

Of course, this is when the witnesses arrive. Loudly. Via breaking door.

“Hello, Sypha.” He says, attempting the clarity of perfect sobriety, which is totally what he is. Has. Is? “Every part of this is 100% on purpose. And I’m not fixing that.”

The still naked snake lady rattles from behind Sypha. If that’s the right word. Throat clicks? “I told you to be careful with the spirits!”

He lurches out of the way of a smokey spear that just materializes out of nowhere mid-thrust, because ghosts are a pain in his ass and get to cheat. “You did not mention  _spirit_ spirits.”

“ _Why would I need to mention ghosts in Dracula’s goddamn basement._ ”

Sypha leans against the wall, strung somewhere between irritated and relieved based on the downward curve of her very nice mouth that Trevor really wants to get better acquainted with. She also crosses her arms across her chest and he accidentally looks at it because the eye is drawn to movement, damn it, nothing else, which leads to him aiming shittily and cracking another bottle open. He freezes, but all it bleeds is sweet, sweet, wasted gin. “Yes. This seems completely under your control.”

“That-” he sways from the arc of a ghostly claw- “is your judgy voice.”

“What could I possibly have to judge about this situation?” Sypha says judgily. The spear passes too close to his ear and sings, different from metal in a way he can’t define. “You’re drunk before breakfast. Setting free angry spirits in a vampire’s basement. Nothing weird about any of this.”

As jaw-hinge poofs back, he curls Morning Star lovingly around its non-existent neck and it erupts into ash. “Very rich from the woman who walked into a cyclops.”

“Wait, you did what?” Naked Snake Woman says.

He’d forgotten she was here, and he literally cannot look at her straight on because of her barbaric lifestyle choices, but he feels a wave of affection that wrings a few tears out his eyes. “Finally. Someone on my side.”

“Shut up, Trevor.”

“You weren’t kidding, earlier. You are kind of dumb.” Naked Snake is his best friend ever, and he will never betray her.

“Excuse me? Literally an hour ago he wanted to drink naga venom. And you call _me_ dumb?!”

Trevor glares in her approximate direction. “Tattletale.” Blue spear wails right in his ear again before swiping the blade towards his neck. He ducks, duh, but it’s still really irritating. He jerks the weighted point of the whip towards himself, and it pierces the wight, turning it to ash. All over him. “Yeurgh.” He spits pitifully. “Dead people dust. In my mouth. Super cool.”

Sypha finally stands up from her lean near the doorway, and swipes the vodka from his dead people covered hand. “Are you alright? You’re bleeding.”

He scowls and swipes it back. “‘Course I’m alright. I’m a Belmont. Watch.” He pours some of the very good vodka over the shoulder the wight nicked. And also some down his throat, because wow, that was way deeper than he thought it was and that fucking stung. “Good as new.”

She sighs, like she’s tired or disappointed. And Trevor really cannot take any fucking more of that today. “Well. As you were." He says. "I’m busy. You’re busy. See you later.”

Her face does something complicated that stings like pity and is far worse. “Trevor. I’m not going to leave you down here.”

The thing about good vodka is that it tastes like ice looks. “Didn’t ask you to. This is _my_ business. You’ve got, got books and magic and whatever.” He waves a hand at the room a at large. “This room is basically my whole thing. So. Y’know. Kindly piss off.”

“Okay. Right. Chanda, grab him.”

“Excuse me?” Trevor and his once-best friend say in concert.

Sypha whips her head back around, and is nothing less than furious. Contrarily, it lets Trevor relax, just a little bit, because it’s not revolting like pity or compassion is, and Trevor is used to dealing with anger. Also, he feels very woozy, like he’d been down here for hours instead of minutes. How much did he have?

Oh. Okay. He’s losing time. He’s also lost the bottle, which is a shame because wow that stuff is strong. Next thing he knows he’s being carried like a sack of potatoes by Snakey with no idea how he got there.

“Oh my god.” he slurs. “You’re naked.” He paws ineffectively at her to be let down before remembering that he’s also touching a naked person and also Sypha is _right there_. “Lemme down.”

“I really, really want to.” She whispers. “Firstly because this is honestly pretty embarrassing, and secondly, you smell super bad. No offense.”

“N’n taken.”

“Almost impressively bad? But also if I let you down you’ll bleed all over the floor instead of just on me. But also _also_ if I do that and the young master smells your blood all over me and Sypha isn’t here I will be crazy murdered.”

“S’pha. Tell’er to pu’ me down.”

“I told her to carry you, stupid. I can see most of your collarbone right now.”

He lifts his head, affronted, before it hurts a lot and he drops it back down. “I tore my shir’ _more_?”

“And also most of your skin and muscle. Perhaps your self-dignity. I’m really fucking mad at you, Trevor.”

“‘Sokay. ‘S easier tha’ way. F’r ev’ryone.” His vision goes a bit fuzzy after that, like before sleep. The last thing he hears is Sypha’s silence, and Snake Lady harshly whispering “Can you _please_ stop having your relationship drama right in front of me, it’s the fucking _worst_ " which is confusing, because he doesn’t remember Alucard getting there. He’s gonna be so pissed about the carpet.

 

* * *

 

Sypha left her blanket and pillow behind that morning, a century ago when Alucard had woken from a sleep shared with her. How her warmth leaked through the layers that separated them, her weight at his side, the lull of her breath as she dreamt. It feels a sin to touch them. She will not want to see him, so he cannot take them to her, but he does not have right to rest with the echo of her beside him.

Inaction nags him to at least dress for bed, regardless of how little he will sleep, or where. He splashes water on his face from the wash basin, and scrubs his hands and wrists with lye-soap until the regeneration of his cells cannot outrace the spreading of raw red. Accidentally wonders if this is how his father felt, or if blood on his hands was simply a nuisance, and he has to go back and scrub again. He’s burnt the clothes he was wearing today, but the scent of Belmont’s blood still lingers like smoke after a forest fire.

He’s finally shrugged on a nightshirt and is deliberating what book he’d most like to stare blankly at ‘til morning when Sypha walks in, dressed for bed and greyly tired.

He cannot speak. Sypha is not always giving, and he does not deserve any gift, but she gives him one anyway. “I am very angry. This is not forgiveness.” He swallows thickly. “But it’s also not not forgiveness. I am angry, and I love you, and I love Trevor. But he will not want someone near him when he wakes up. You do. And I want to sleep. I want to sleep _with_ you. So unless you object, I’m very tired, and want to wake up tomorrow with someone that wants to do better than yesterday.”

“I can’t promise I’ll do better.” He croaks.

She offers a hand from where she’s burrowed into the covers, head near the foot of the bed like she promised. “None of us can. But we can try.”

“I don’t deserv-”

“Alucard, if I hear anything about what anyone does or does not deserve ever again, I will box their ears. And maybe set something on fire. There is no magical set of scales. There is just you. And me. And Trevor. And everyone else.” A minute passes, and he says nothing, and her hand drops to the bed. It feels like failure. He doesn’t want to fail.

He clears his throat and hopes to God he does not cry. “What kind of man am I, to not take a lady’s hand when offered.” Her skin is soft, and dry, and when she clenches her hand around his, he sees the nails bitten down to the quick, blood flaking from the cuticles from when she held Trevor down and still as he stitched him up, at Trevor thrashed under his hands and a needle cruelly curved.

She listens to the words he cannot say, yet, maybe ever. But her eyelids shut, and her breath goes deep and even. With her hand in his, he sleeps to wake up for tomorrow.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The floor bits with burn damage are a holdover from Alucard’s short lived “the floor is lava” stage as a child. He had very indulgent parents.
> 
>  -
> 
> I'm not sure what i was thinking when I thought this would be a dumb idiots exclusively being good naturedly dumb idiots fic. these guys sure have had some EXPERIENCES, HUH.
> 
> thank you so much for your comments and reviews ! they have me figuring out what goes next with comparative speed at a very busy time of year.


	7. Chapter 7

Trevor wakes to a note left perched on his forehead, stuck with some unguent or another. In Sypha’s slanted hurried writing it says:

_Lord Stupid of Belmont,_

_Small ale and oatcakes are in the bathroom. Don’t pull your stitches. Find me when you’re done._

_Sypha_

Which makes him snort in a way that _does_ pull his stitches, thanks, Sypha, and roll his eyes. Sypha’s ideas of subtle machinations have more in common with siege weapons than usual persuasion. This is a battering ram.

She’s also drawn a little map to the bathroom underneath it, which is rude, and definitely does not make him smile stupidly. The little Trevor on the map has stink lines. She really is the absolute worst.

* * *

 

Shrugging off the stupid frilly shirt that definitely does not belong to him and the bandages, he pokes at the inflamed edges of one of the gashes left behind by the wight’s stupid claws. The skin’s red and angrily warm, but not hot, and no pus seeps out when he presses a cautious finger against it. He runs a finger over the stitches he can reach, which are thick, and black, and evenly spanning the gashes over his shoulder and neck. Surprisingly neat for ‘field fucking cauterization’ Belnades. Overall, not the worst he’s had. One rest day, maybe two, and he’ll be in tip top shape. Exploratorily, he pulls at the thin yellow edges of the beginning scab, and hisses. It hurts. Which! Not surprising! The rest of his skin not peeling off with it is a win though. It’d be real awkward if it dealt necrotic damage and he’d have to ask Speaker ‘any excuse to set something on fire’ to actually cauterize it. Burning flesh? Not great. Not his favourite smell.

Frowning, he carefully tries to move his injured shoulder up and down, and can’t manage more than a centimetre or two without icecold _wrong_ branching through his torso like lightning. When his mind is actually capable of thinking, he notices he’s bit through his lip, presumably to keep the scream down. So. That’s not ideal. It makes him really, really not want to get in the bathtub and scrub. It made him really want to lie down and get drunk a little more. Being fourteen, or twenty, or thirty-two probably, and being a cool adventurous guy like him who protects the weak and slays goblins and ghouls as necessary and _also_ occasionally got rocks thrown at delicate parts of himself by frankly rude townspeople does _not_ a completely well body make. All of his stupid muscles connect to other stupid muscles, and there’s always at least one that is bruised or torn or cut asunder, which altogether makes bathing an arduous and very not fun experience.  However. There’s also Sypha and her sad face to consider. And he does smell deeply, awfully rank. Fuck. He’s going to have to take the stupid bath.

To bolster his spirits and make his mouth feel less like it’s filled with moth corpses, he gratefully chugs down the watered small ale the best he can without raising his good arm too high. Nibbling cautiously at an oatcake, he eyes the small jar left by the jug. It doesn’t look cursed, but maybe the label proclaiming _healing liniment- apply liberally to all cut_ _ſ, bruiſeſ, and ſcrapeſ_  is just a convincing double bluff. He cautiously unscrews the lid, and takes a good whiff. Cloves. Working on the philosophy that something that smells like pie could never truly be evil, he slathers it on to his shoulder which goes gratifyingly numb, making re-bandaging his shoulder only an awkward and time intensive experience instead of a painful one.

With that particular hurdle jumped, Trevor looks askance at the polished silver taps that jut out from the masonry. When he and Sypha got the grand tour, Alucard had explained the nuances of the bath, twisting similarly polished knobs for steaming water to gush forth. As a naturally suspicious man, Trevor found this highly fucking suspicious. Hot water? Coming out of a wall? With no fire or magic obviously involved? Too good to be true. The good ol’ Belmont paranoia has kept generations of the bloodline alive just long enough to reproduce for centuries, after all. With some notable exceptions.

Ugh, Trevor doesn’t have _time_ to think about his wah wah tragic backstory, how smoke had choked the air and how his nostrils flared full with the acrid stench of cloth and hair burning. Not when the grief isn’t a sudden gut punch, these days, isn’t a hangman’s noose that gets heavier and heavier until it drags his shoulders down, sprinting to the bottom of a tankard. It’s a heavy cloak that he sometimes forgets he is wearing. It is boots mired in mud. There’s more pressing concerns that make it easier to ignore his own shit.

Alucard’s grief is a living thing that dogs his steps more faithfully than any shadow. It is the kind of grief that Trevor imagines sends marble statues to wailing, blood sliding down their curved cheeks. It is the kind of grief that, tempered with anger, caused Dracula to seek genocide. It is the kind of grief that leaves Alucard terrified of losing Sypha, that has him lashing out at the person he thinks will steal her away, leaves him stupid enough to think Sypha is a thing to be stolen and that Trevor is any kind of threat.

So, yeah, Trevor gets in the bath but he doesn’t fucking linger. There’s better things to be done, and a place this still does nothing but let you think.

It’s a bitch to scrub yourself down with only one arm and a limited range of motion. Still, he manages to lather one armpit pretty well and his hair is no longer a solid mass fused to his skull, so that’s alright. He’d forgotten how nice it was to be clean. He feels lighter, maybe, and a little less like shit.

He is missing the critical component of shirt, however, because no man in the right mind would put that frilled disaster on again.

Hm.

That’s a bit of a problem.

* * *

 

Trevor isn’t in bed resting like he’s supposed to be, and didn’t come see Sypha so she could trick him into drinking a sleeping drought so he’d _actually_ be in bed resting the rest of the forcibly comatose, so it’s Alucard’s responsibility to track him down. According to _some_ people, ‘I don’t want to because I embarrassed myself because I’m a tempermental idiot and made Trevor very upset and angry’ isn’t a good enough reason to avoid him. He feels definitively otherwise, but doesn’t want to deal with the weight of Sypha’s disappointment and upset on top of Trevor’s. Admittedly, he does feel nauseous, not knowing where Belmont is. With his luck, he’s torn out Alucard’s carefully done stitches and is bleeding out all over one of Alucard’s nicer rugs, an image that is surely burned into the dark of his eyelids. Just to really emphasize how much Alucard fucked up.

Usually Trevor’s stench makes it easy enough to track him, or his pulse, if he’s not too far away. The idea of a clean Trevor, hair fluffy and soft, skin unmarred by dirt or blood, is a compelling image, and one he tries to stamp all over the one of Trevor gasping for breath as he dies. He redoubles his pace down the main thoroughfares of the castle, ears straining to hear the steady thud of Trevor’s heartbeat. Eventually, in the south wing, he hears it.

He can hear Trevor’s heartbeat thumping slow and regular inside his chest. A tension he didn’t know was yoked heavy around his neck releases. He follows it like siren song, and doesn’t bother to think about the area it’s in until he sees the dining room puzzle carefully arranged and gleaming. Through the secret passage, he hears the susurrus of vines, and Trevor talking. Light and easy in a way maybe he will never have.

He really doesn’t want to go in there.

But also, Sypha may literally murder him, which barely supercedes his desparate desire to flee and stick his head under the sand for the next several millenia. He takes a deep breath, and firmly reminds himself to watch his temper. No matter how difficult Trevor makes it. No more stupid mistakes.

It’s… certainly not what he expected.

The vine creature that so recently had dangled Trevor like a cat may a mouse is curled around him, vines moving rhythmically in a pattern he can’t quite divine, as a very different scenario involving Trevor and rhythmically moving vines suddenly sears its way into his brain, what the _fuck_. What with all the blood rushing away from his extremities, his foot numbly trips over a cobblestone and sends him sprawling. He hears more than sees Trevor startle, as his traitor face is thankfully covered by the curtain of his hair. Trevor’s pulse begins to speed and he hisses, the scent of his blood clouding the air.

This is to say, Alucard’s erection issue is _appalling._

“Haven’t you heard of knocking?” Trevor grouses, and he hears the wet pop of a finger pressing between his lips, Jesus Christ. “What with your people’s invitation issues, you’d think there was some manner of politeness bred into you.”

The safest thing is probably to lay on the floor until he can convince his body that this is a stupendously stupid time to be aroused. Or until Trevor walks away, confused. Or he dies of mortification. With the last two brain cells capable of rational thought, he wonders if he can convince Trevor that this is a traditional vampire apology ritual performed after being a massive ass. Fuck. That would mean _apologizing_.

He can hear Trevor starting to shift uneasily, the rustle of cloth on stone and the damnable ripple of plant matter. “Are. No.” Trevor clears his throat. “Are you. Okay? Hey. Plant. Pause for a second.”

The Plantasy™ is renewed with vigour. There is a whine building at the roof of his mouth that he desperately wants to let out. The brain cells rally admirably, and Alucard grits out, “I’m apologizing. Shut up, Trevor.”

“Trevor now, is it? Seems forward of you. Only been using my last name since we met, and what have you.”

The brain cells waver, pointing out how forward Alucard would like to be, and that there’s probably no better time or place, and that, in fact, there are some amenable vines that could give them many, _many_ structural options. He fucking _nails_ his forehead against the stone floor, and sulkily, higher brain function turns back on around the throbbing pain. Some remaining traitorous dendrites remind him that it’s not the only thing that’s throbbing.

“I’ve got to say,” Trevor says, “that this is the weirdest apology I’ve ever received. Well. Am in the process of receiving.”

“Maybe if you let me get a word in edgewise-”

Trevor makes a derisive noise. “You are famously good with your words. On dark winter nights, townsfolk whisper the terrible tales of how good you are at expressing your thoughts and ideas. Just absolutely stellar, they say.”

It feels safe enough to raise his head to glare at Trevor, who is indeed not being thoroughly buggered by a sentient plant, but sitting criss cross against its bulky stem, a half-sewn shirt draped across his knee. Distressingly, he’s shirtless. “You’re no better than me.” Alucard says. “I think that’s why you’re being such a bitch about it.”

That startles a laugh out of him, and Alucard viciously kicks down the thread of fuzzy warmth that dredges up. “This is the worst apology ever. And I’ve had church officials try to sorry-not-sorry their way out of a conversation about burning my family alive.”

Yikes. “The church is notably the worst.” Alucard replies cautiously.

“The _fucking_ worst.” A long and awkward silence follows, broken only by a vine slithering forward to poke Alucard in the side. Scowling, he slaps it away. Trevor smiles, a sunny, awful thing, and leans back carefully on his good hand. His stomach muscles move distractingly. “Take your time.”

Alucard does a physical inventory, and notes that it’s finally safe to sit up, so he does. “Care to explain why you’re traipsing around the castle?” Shirtless? “Against the doctor’s orders?” Shirtless? “Shirtless?”

Trevor scritches at his stomach thoughtlessly. “‘s good for the humours. Are you forgetting something? Starts with an ‘s?’ Ends with ‘orry?’”

“I’m working up to it. You didn’t answer my question.”

He sighs, and Alucard can’t help but look at how his stomach and chest rise and fall. Luckily, Trevor is dumb as bricks and won’t call him out for being a creep, which is a genetic predisposition, and unacceptable regardless. “I tore my last shirt. Sypha, in an act of petty revenge that frankly is beneath her, put me in a frothy… blouse. Ergo, need new shirt. Only got one hand, so I needed someone with a surplus of hands. Stems. Appendages. Whatever.” He holds out a hand, palm flat, and the plant bestows him with a crisp high five. Alucard kind of wants to rip it apart. Alucard kind of wants to gather up every other shirt he owns until one is met with Trevor’s approval and drape it over his shoulders. Alucard kind of wants to throw him over his shoulder and make Sypha deal with this whole issue.

Instead, Alucard repeats ‘ergo’ as dubiously as he can. The plant slaps him across the wrist.

Trevor cackles. “We’re best friends. I’ve called him Trevor.”

Aghast, he replies, “you can’t give him your name.”

“Why not? ‘s a _great_ name.”

“Well. It’s already got one.”

Trevor looks to the plant, which makes a waffling motion with one vine, and the grin Trevor grins is the shit eatingest grin. “See? He likes Trevor.”

The Plantastic™ images raise their terrible heads and Alucard emphatically bashes them back down. “Somebody has to,” he says, which is the wrong thing to say when he’s trying to banish all explicit thoughts from his mind. “Look. Trevor… the _plant_ Trevor… could you excuse us for a moment.”

It’s not a request. The plant mostly slithers away, leaving behind the thick stem Trevor’s been leaning against. The human Trevor raises an eyebrow expectantly. Alucard breathes deeply, and counts to ten. “I’m. Sorry. I’ve been baiting you since I met you. And I don’t really know how to stop.”

Trevor nods sagely. “Probably the jealousy.”

“Yes the- wait. What?”

He rolls his eyes, and starts sewing again. A single tendril slithers from the main plant mass to hold the fabric still. “I’m not stupid, Alucard. I have eyes. I’ve seen the looks.”

“Oh?” Alucard says faintly.

“Apparently you are. Stupid, that is, which is wild. I’m going to go with ‘traumatic teenage years’ and ‘Dadcula’ as the main causes of your complete inability to flirt capably.”

“Oh?” Alucard squeaks.

“Lucky for you, I am deeply emotionally intelligent,” which is patently false, “and willing to help you in this trying time. And sweet baby Jesus, you are deeply trying. This, overall, has been a trial.” Alucard swallows, wordless, and stares at where Trevor carefully ties off a shoulder seam with the help of the plant. “But you have nothing to worry about. It’s going to be fine.”

This allows Alucard the courage to look up at Trevor’s face, where he is smiling like a martyr triptych. “It is?” Alucard says dumbly.

“Of course. I understand completely.”

“You do?”

“Yes, dumbass.” Alucard feels his heart swelling in his chest like some of the stupider poets and more dubious physicians described. “I get it.”

“Oh thank G-”

“You’re in love with Sypha.”

“-od. What.”

“Don’t play dumb. I’ve seen the looks at her. And me. But you are _crazy_ undersocialized if you’re jealous of me.” He shifts the shirt so that he can begin sewing the arm bits shut. Alucard feels a lot like he’s stepped into an alternate dimension. “Sypha’s just. Friendly.”

“Friendly?” He parrots dumbly, because that’s all he’s got left.

Trevor snorts again, inelegant and so fucking dumb. “Don’t let her hear that. Trevor, can you-” Oblingingly, another tendril breaks free to hold the shirt still. “-thanks. Anyway. I won’t get in your way. Get to the wooing. And I’ll toodle-oodle-oo when your castle’s all fixed up.”

Alucard stares for a long moment. “That isn’t what’s happening. At all.”

“Don’t be embarrassed. Sypha’s awesome. Well. Mostly awesome, but you’re already overlooking her flaws so I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“ _That is not what is-”_

“No, shut up. You’re not getting it, so you’re making me have to be genuine and shit, so do me the solid of actually listening.”  Trevor puts down the needle and thread, and then, shockingly, makes direct eye contact in a non-combative situation. “I’m not a threat. I won’t get in the way.”

Alucard has lost all control of his face, and is surely gaping like a half-witted fool. “In the way?”

“Of you and Sypha, obviously.”

Alucard blinks helplessly. “I’ve got to go.” And he fucking books it. Which, all things considered, is the only reasonable response.

* * *

 

Sypha is quietly seething in the calmest study she could find, but is still so pissed that she’s ripped her quill through the parchment enough times that she had to scrap a whole sheet. She hates wasting things. She hates men.  She hates the fact that she just scrawled hard enough to rip it again, _fuck._

Alucard bursts in, and does not immediately describe how he got Trevor to go lie the fuck down, which is a mistake. “Did you get Trevor to go rest?”

“Nope, completely forgot.”

“Piss off, Alucard, and don’t come back until you’ve tricked that dumbass into lying down.”

He rushes over to her desk, and grabs her hand. She doesn’t look up because she is mad, damn it, and no amount of romantic hand holding is going to fix that. “Sypha. You’ve gravely miscalculated.”

“About what?”

He makes a desperate sound in the back of his throat, and she finally looks up. Alucard’s usually immaculate hair is messy, and he is wild-eyed. “Belmont is not just being thickheaded. He thinks you’re in love with me.”

“Well. I am.”

His grip tightens, and his eyes go significantly crazier. “ _Only_ with me.”

Sypha bolts up from her chair, accidentally letting the feet screech against the floor. “Oh.” Her mind is oddly blank, all the thoughts and knowledge in chests of drawers far far away. “And you?”

He grips her hand even tighter, and she tries to anchor herself to the feeling. “That I’m desperately pining over you and unable to say anything.”

“Weirdly specific.”

“He went off on a tangent.”

“But you _are_ desperately pining and unable to say anything because you’re a giant woman’s blouse.”

He gesticulates impatiently. “Well, yes, but _only_ with you.”

She drops her chin to her other hand too quick, jarring and clicking her teeth. “Oh, wow. It’s worse than I thought.”

Alucard groans, and slumps to the floor like the dramatic woman’s blouse he is. She loves him so, so much. “Also he’s trying to sew one handed and isn’t lying down and resting.”

“That _stupid_ smelly bastard.”

“Well. He smells tolerable, at the moment.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR *air horn noises*
> 
> look. look. I dont know what happened here. dont look at me. vampires are perverts, they cant help it, they're weak to sexuality and radiant damage .
> 
> this is patched together from several drafts and largely unrevised so if u see something confusing, lmk. if u thought it was great u should also let me know, my brain melted, so many paperwork

**Author's Note:**

> if u had a fun time please let me know! I watched season 2 of castlevania and basically wrote this in a fugue state so.


End file.
